Hello eIreland,
Today I'd like to present you with a tutorial on the monetary market.
This article is an eIrish Ministry of Education version of the information and ideas presented here by eisenmutter2 of eRussia. Vote it!

Both new citizens and veterans should find this article informative.

What Is The Monetary Market?

The Monetary Market (MM) is an interface that allows citizens to trade currency(cc/money) for gold(g) and vice versa.

Currency(IEP) is generally used to buy weapons and food amongst citizens in the Marketplace. It has some other uses as well, such as to pay when moving regions, or to buy alliances, wars, and airstrikes for the government. Currency is earned by selling goods in the Marketplace, or as a salary for working in a company.

Gold is generally used to buy things from the game such as training, building upgrades, newspapers, and military units. Gold is earned from medals and levelling up.

The Monetary Market will allow you to trade these two mediums of exchange:

OR

You will find that gold is the more rare of the two, and so as you continue to read keep in mind that you should not spend gold carelessly.

How Do I Use It?
The Monetary Market is not a complicated interface, but it's important that you double check what you're doing, before buying or adding an offer, to avoid making costly mistakes.

Above we see the basic layout of the Monetary Market. Let's go over what each element of the layout is for.

Red - This button will change the display from showing offers to buy gold, to showing offers to buy IEP. Pay close attention to which screen you are looking at.

Green - This button allows you to add your own offer to the market, which will appear along side the other offers in the current screen.

Orange - This button will show you a list of the existing offers that you are currently advertising on the Monetary Markets. From that list you can choose to remove any offers you've made, but be careful as exchanges happen very quickly.

Blue - This button will bring you back to a list of all the offers currently on your market of choice (buying gold or buying IEP).

Pink - Here you see one of the offers on the market. The offer lists the citizen who is making it, the amount of gold their deal has in stock, and the exchange rate they are asking for.

Notice how for this offer you can buy 1 gold for 386.790 IEP. The number that you input for the "Buy:" entry box is the amount of gold that you wish to buy. Once you hit "Buy >" your transaction will be immediately carried out. All deals are final.

Above we see what your screen will look like if you press the switch button that was highlighted in red on the previous example. On this screen we can buy IEP in exchange for our gold.

Notice the offer highlighted in purple. This citizen has 5199.00 currency in stock and is asking us to give him 0.003 gold for every 1 IEP that we buy. That's an exchange rate of 333.33 IEP for every 1 gold that we give him. That exchange rates favour gold this way is typical.

It's also important to remember that there is a daily 10 gold limit on buying gold. This will be important later for currency trading, and is also important to the Ministry of Finance since it explains why organizations (special government pseudo-citizens) are so important - each one is an extra ten gold per day of trading capacity.

It's also interesting to note that countries no longer really have their own currency. There is only one currency other than gold under the current economic module. This currency is simply shown as the national currency of whichever eNation you have citizenship in, IEP in our case, and is freely traded internationally as one standard currency. The offers on the Monetary Market are from all around the eWorld, but are all one universal currency.

Adding Your Offer

There are really two ways that you can use the Monetary Market. The first, as we saw before, is by buying from other peoples offers in the market. The second ,which we will talk about now, by adding your own offers to the market and waiting for someone to do business.

In the image above we see the four boxes about adding our own offers.

Red - The familiar switch between buying gold, and buying IEP. We always double check this to make sure we're setting up the offer we want.

Yellow - This is the "Add offer" button that we clicked to get to this entry screen.

Blue - Here we enter the amount of gold or IEP that we want to sell for its counterpart.

Green - Here we enter the amount of counterpart gold/IEP that we want per unit of our offer, effectively giving us out exchange rate. When we multiply our stock, from the blue box, by our exchange rate we get the amount of gold/IEP that we will end up with once our stock is out. In this case 50 IEP multiplied by 0.003 gold would give us 0.15 gold by the end of our deal.

Once we click to save the offer, our browser should prompt us to confirm.Let this be another reminder that all deals are final once someone uses your offer!

If we choose to accept adding our offer we can view the offer later, along with all of our other offers, under the "My offers" tab seen above highlighted in pink.

Here we can edit or delete our offers.
But beware: Monetary Market exchanges happen very quickly.

Making Money On The Monetary Market

Now this is the part that should be good for citizens of all ages. We all know that there's a lot of money to be made by trading on the Monetary Markets - just look at what it does for our Ministry of Finance. Even despite that, a lot of us seem to shy away from taking advantage of monetary trade. Well there's no need to!

Making money on the monetary market is essentially an investment game. At its very simplest we're talking about two transactions - buying cheap and then selling high.

Here we'll examine some methods of making money on the monetary market.

Long-Term Trading
If you keep an eye on the monetary market for a few weeks you will notice that gold prices will go up when there are special offers. If you wait for a trough (low price period) in gold values and you're ready to take some risk, you can buy gold for around 385 IEP/gold and then wait for the next special to spike demand for gold. You can then sell for a handsome profit depending on how much of an investment you've made and how sharp the spike is.

Knowing the market and how it reacts to in-game events (especially Plato induced ones) is key to making good long term investments. Remember though, investment comes with risk!

Day Trading
Day trading is a faster paced method of earning gold on the monetary market. With day trading your aim is to trade back and forth all on the same day, or even the same login session, and turn a profit.

Your friend when it comes to day trading is citizens who need currency/gold fast and are willing to put up very good exchange rates to get it.
Most daytraders seem to find that 15:00+ erep time is the best time to find good deals.

Have a look at the first two pages of gold offers to get an idea of the safe ballpark. Under normal circumstances the first several pages will all be offers of around 1 gold for 385 IEP - and this way we know that if someone is offering anything like 1 gold for 380 IEP (ie. reasonably better deal than the status quo) that we should take that deal immediately. We can sell that same gold at closer to the status quo amount and turn a fast profit.

These kind of deals normally result from someone being impatient to get their hands on currency so that they can buy the essentials for a battle. Imagine you're warring over a Battle Hero medal and you suddenly run out of food/weapons and don't have any IEP to buy them. Rather than lose the BH, you might simply make the Monetary Market an offer it can't refuse and get some fast currency. These kind of offers do happen on the Monetary Market, it's just a matter of keeping an eye out and taking advantage.Usually the profits from day trading is modest, but the risk is fairly low. Over time though, day trading can make you rich.Making Even More Money - Gold-Rushes
If you know how to spot certain opportunities in the Monetary Market, you may be able to make even more profit if you're lucky.

Often later into the erep time evening (17:00 and later) you may start to see a gold-rush... traders who have large amounts of gold (hundreds of it) and who want to switch it into currency. It might be logical to assume that these are gold buyers who have recently made a purchase and now want currency. For speculators (that's you and me who have been watching the markets) these sellers are a golden opportunity (literally).

At the right time of day you can get more than one Midas (a seller with lots of gold he/she wants turned into currency fast) and they will start to drive the market down by competing to get their gold sold first. Most other users wont have the currency to buy so much gold at once, so these Midases will need to sell cheap if they want to turn their gold over soon. In the right conditions a gold-rush can force the market down quite low to as little as 60-100 IEP cheaper than normal (depending on the status quo market conditions). So be on the lookout for offers with large amounts of gold and one or two impatient players driving down the best deals.

Making Even More Money - Gold Fishing

Remember the difference in exchange rates we saw between the gold buying and currency buying markets?

If you go to add offer and sell 3334 IEP at the rate of 1 IEP for 0.003 gold, it will take about 10 days for your offer to reach the top of the list.

With some luck your offer will then be bought up eventually - 3334 IEP X 0.003 gold = ~10 gold(the daily limit).Remember the 10 gold limit! Watch out that you don't do any other gold buying around this time or you could have to start over.

Now as long as the currency buying market is above 1 gold for 333 IEP (which is usually is) you'll make a profit. If the rates are around 1 gold for 388 IEP as they have been, you'll be looking at something like 3880 IEP back.

3880 IEP - 3334 IEP... that's a profit of 546 IEP!

Watch out for large changes in the markets, normally sparked by admin changes, and adjust accordingly. It isn't difficult to figure out how to make profit using this method. 500 IEP in your pocket every once in a while is really nice money - especially compared to normal wages.

Conclusion
So as you see, there are always opportunities to make money using the Monetary Market. Remember though, be careful and always double check yourself before you take risks. If you keep at it, and get a feel for the markets, you'll be rolling in IEP and gold in no time.

yeah about "Making Even More Money - Gold-Rushes" (or in my article 4.3 HOP ON THE TRAIN)

i said there that the MM can drop down more than 100cc.
the last time i had this the rate was around 1g:650cc and it dropped below 1:520. so at the rates now at 1:380 to 1:370 this would be a drop of more than 60cc.

i don't want to say a 100cc drop can't happen at the moment but this stuff is rare
not that some newbies are impatiently waiting for a drop down to 270cc now...

they are talking about some stuff that may have an influence on the MM like
"- Alliances will be added in-game
- The military unit reforms
- Community storage space
- Removal captain elections
- Economy module balance"

if there are changes it can be a good opportunity to make a nice profit again - well, or to lose high...
i hope we will stand on the winning side though